Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 17:58:37 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: negativity wins


Dear Howard,

Many thanks for your two posts.

As you know, in approaching any text, I think there's an important
difference between 1) the hermeneutical moment - arriving at a
hereneutically adequate understanding. And 2) the moment of critique.

To achieve 1) we have to try and bracket our own basic assumptions about
the world, or at least to allow our 'horizons' to fuse with those of the
text. And until we more less achieve 1) there is not a great deal of
point (though we all do it) in engaging in 2), because we would be
engaging with phantoms or straw persons. 

Now, as I read your posts, you are basically going into bat for Marxist
materialism and science, as you see them, and I think that one aspect of
this in particular - philosophical or ontological materialism - a) is
actually getting in the way of your and our achieving 1); and b) is not
philosophically or scientifically defensible in the twenty-first century
anyhow, so best not just to bracket, but to ditch, it. Let me emphasize,
though that (as I've argued before), ditching ontological materialism
does not entail ditching epistemological materialism (transcendental or
scientific realism), practical materialism, or historical materialism -
in fact it could enrich them all. Also, I'm not saying that we shouldn't
collaborate - we do, and I'm learning a lot - but imo some assumptions
act as constraints on further advance (in Bhaskarese: for understanding
to flourish, they need to be absented or bracketed).

Thus, although your posts are ambiguous on this point, you seem to think
causality is ultimately somehow 'material'. Thus 'there must be a bearer
of causal power', which is 'broadly matter or energy'. But *is* energy
'matter'? Is there any real warrant for this in modern science? Why not
just say that it is 'real'? Your ontological materialism - only the
'material' can be properly causal it would seem - is not imo consistent
with that of Marx, for whom social relations are causal, and
paradoxically issues in an idealist/materialist dualism (spirit/matter)
when it comes to 'the mental and the causal': 

<My stopping just now [PAUSE] to think of J.S. Bach is
not causal.>

You stopped for a reason, and reasons are, on a CR account, causes -
which is the only way, short of reductive materialism, that dualism can
be avoided.

Similarly in the exchange immediately preceding this:

<MH: "[T]he identification of positive existents depends on human
agency, which always involves absenting an existing state of affairs 'be
it only a state of existential doubt'."

<HE: "Absenting existential doubt" is not what we usually mean when we
talk of human agency.  My insight that X is not an act.  Agency is
better understood as the actual causal transformation of the world.
The insight is not an act, but giving expression to it is.>

Clearly you think that the transformation of mental states (absenting
existential doubt - is it a lake or a mirage?) is not transformation of
(part of) the world. But on CR, and I would have thought Marxist,
premises, it is - ie mental states are real!

You accept that existence, being, is 'bivalent' (absence/presence). What
we need to do is 'develop the bivalent aspects of being', what you study
'is the thing as a real mechanism ... as an interpenetration of positive
and negative existence'. So far, imo, so good. But you also say:

>unable to specify an internal
>structure for deonts, the argument is made that onts don't have structure
>either -- as Mervyn said on 2/27, "in a relational world onts don't have a
>nature and structure in their own right either."  This means the key to
>their being is to be found in relation.  Now we have a problem.  Deonts
>don't have structure; onts don't have structre; and relatoins are
>non-empirical, depending on the things of which they are relations for
>their anchor.  So we are sort of out in the ozone.  We have lost the
>material hold on science that some of us presuppose.  

But the position you are rejecting here seems to be identical with the
one you espouse above. The possibility of losing 'material hold' seems
to be what really worries you. Perhaps you think that only onts, after
all - 'material existences' in some sense - are really real? Or that in
electricity, only the positive current is really real, but not the
negative? However that may be, while you accept that absence is
*relationally real*, you don't accept that there are real *non-beings*
or negative presences/existents.  But the relationality of the world
does not entail that there are not real distinctions *within* it. Thus
Archer and Bhaskar argue, rightly, I think, that there is an ontological
distinction between persons and the social context. Similarly, to raise
the flag of Tobin's sock again, while the sock is indeed a unity of
presence and absence, the numerous functional holes are ontologically
distinct from the threads of wool which present themselves as pure
positivity (but which are in turn comprised of presences and absences).
If now an infant puts the sock in its mouth and chokes, it will be the
positive existents, not the negative ones, which do the choking - but
now they can only do their work in virtue of the gap in the infant's
face, and so on ad infinitum. If positive and negative existents weren't
ontologically distinct, i.e. real, everything would just be glumph, or
collapse into an infinitely dense ball - instead of a stratified
differentiating open totality we'd have a collapsed monad.

You say:

<It is just as much a *logical* possibility that
there could have been a purely positive world where everything moved and
changed because it was exquisitely choreographed by the Grand Ballet
Master in the Sky as it is to assume the corresponding *logical*
possibility that there could have been just nothing.>

This misses the point that there wouldn't be a sky if there were no
gaps, nor could anything move because there would be no space to move
in. Here 'pure positivity' imo has definitely 'crept back in'.

But we do agree that the world as we know it is bivalent and that
'entity relationism' will therefore be an important concept to deploy in
trying to understand it. 

Bhaskar, however, thinks that the world is not just bivalent, it is
*polyvalent*, and here (as in many other respects) he cites Marx on his
side - see the section in DPF on the materialist *diffraction* of the
dialectic. Polyvalence fundamentally means, I think, that what is
positive at one level or sphere of reality, or at one time, may be
negative at another, and vice versa, and that by 'a valid perspectival
switch' we can view them under their negative or positive aspect - as is
to be expected in a stratified, changing, interrelating, agentive (1M-
4D) world. (Tobin and Marsh have recently in effect made this point I
think). Thus the transitive dimension of our world can be referentially
detached as the not-transitive dimension. Hominids at one time became
not-hominids (humans) at another, and cherry blossoms grow into
cherries. An old building (indeed, the whole of 'material culture') is
not only an ensemble of presence and absence, maintained by present
labour and care, but has at least two overall negative dimensions: it is
(an aspect of) the past-in-the-present (the transformative negation of
raw materials by past or absent labour), and of the future-in-the-
present (making its contribution to 'shaped possibility'). Ditto for
social structure, minus the materials. In the sphere of consumption,
most commodities are useful in their different ways, but in the sphere
of exchange all their different uses are abstractly negated and declared
identical, and this finds its positive expression in notes and coins,
which in turn have a negative existence qua debt and credit, etc.  
Etc, etc. 

Can you (more or less) go along with polyvalence, or would you see it as
threatening to 'materialist science'?

Mervyn




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